The advent of blogs and social media has given companies a new platform to share information. Prior to these platforms, many companies relied entirely on the news sections of their site to place important information. Announcements about awards, new hires and press releases lived online, and companies were able to keep interested parties up to date on the latest information.

Social media added another piece to the puzzle. Now you can not only post relevant information in blogs and news sections, but also let people know that you posted it. This is where the ball has dropped with many companies. Many businesses have adopted the practice of posting their news and information, but still haven’t jumped on the social media bandwagon. These businesses are leaving great information about their company on their website, hidden from the eyeballs of their audience.

The process of engaging in new technology can be daunting, and for bigger organizations it can be a process that takes several years to sort out, which is okay. The social media landscape can be very good for business, but if you aren’t prepared, it can also backfire in a hurry. That being said the risk is worth taking.

Today, the decision to start posting important content online, needs to come with a plan to share that content through social media channels. The Internet is a massive beast full of hundreds of companies just like yours fighting you for the next big account or sale. If you are sitting on the sidelines completely, or worse yet spending time and money to post updated content and not share it, it is time to take that next step and join the social media fray.

The important thing to remember is you could have the greatest website with the freshest content, but if you aren’t sharing it on Facebook, Google+ and/or Twitter, people just aren’t going to stumble upon it. Google search of course does wonders and good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important, but there is something about social media that separates it and makes it a stronger tool. That distinction is the ability to truly connect with the people that love your brand or industry. By creating a strong connection, you build trust, and through that trust you will gain business.

An important fact to remember is that with the constant conversation online people ARE talking about your brand, company or small business. By sitting on the sidelines you have no ability to defend yourself or change their mind. Stepping into the fire, however daunting that may be, gives you the opportunity to connect with your customer and make sure that the content you are working hard to post online is getting out to the audience you want to reach.

Back in March, we released our first open source project, cf-password-generator. Today, we’re happy to announce our second open source project: Kindling.  Kindling is a CFML framework that aims to make it easy for developers to get a new website up-and-running. It is not a content management system; it’s a content-focused template and plugin system. It’s configurable, it’s flexible and it’s simple.

History

Most of the sites we produce at L&S are powered by some sort of content management system. This gives our clients a convenient tool for managing and updating their website without requiring our involvement or assistance. A content management system provides convenient functionality, but it also provides restrictions on where files are placed, how code is structured and where content lives. My most common frustration with content management systems is that you can’t just follow the URL to make an update to the site. You know exactly where your content is on the front-end, but, until you’re comfortable with the CMS, you have no idea where to fix it on the back-end.

Of course, not every project requires a content management system: maybe the site is for a short-lived campaign, maybe the client prefers to have us make updates to the site or maybe the site needs to be up as fast as possible. Why go through the effort and expense of a CMS when an old-fashioned, content website is all that’s needed? I found myself in just this situation, so I set out to create a framework that lets content live where you think it lives while also providing the tools necessary to quickly create a content website.

The result was Kindling.

How To Use It

Kindling is as easy to use as downloading it, moving it into your webroot and browsing the website. A successful install should result in a webpage that displays “Welcome to Kindling.” An unsuccessful install might result in swearing and frustration. In that case, hopefully the project Wiki can provide some direction.

One of the tenets of Kindling is that content lives where you think it does. CFM pages are used for the content with JSON files providing meta data about the page (page name, title, template, description, &c.). Thanks to the template system, content pages only have to include the content for that page; everything else can be tucked away in a template file for easy management and simpler content editing. For dynamic content, you can write your own CFML in either the template or content page, or you can use the plugin architecture to keep things simple and clean.

Kindling is not designed to replace content management systems, but it is designed to make creating content websites easier and faster. We’ve worked hard to provide as much information about the project in the project Wiki as we can. Feel free to start at the Overview Wiki page to learn how to install, use and extend the framework for your projects in greater detail.

Contribute

Do you want to help us out?

Check out the source and submit patches under the Issues tab. Or you can leave a comment on our Contribute Wiki page and we might give you contributor or committer access to the project.

We’re open to comments, critiques and questions, and we’d love your help in developing the L&S Open Source projects.

While browsing websites online, looking for inspiration to write this blog, a photo of one of my favorite musical artists jumped out at me. “Oh! What’s Jay-Z up to? And who’s that old, short guy smirking next to him? Is that…Warren Buffet?” At first, it seems like a strange combination. Is Warren Buffet making a cameo in Jay-Z’s next video? But the connection between these two gentlemen quickly dawned on me – entrepreneurial kings. And they’re merging their strengths to television, not for a news special or 20/20 episode, but to create a cartoon for kids.

Buffet originally created Secret Millionaires Club as an animated Web series, but now the show is making its TV debut on October 23^rd. The show teaches children about money, personal growth and business. In one episode, “Cancel my Reputation,” the Secret Millionaires Club learns how “to build a good reputation and why it’s important.” The episodes range in topics from the importance of not cutting corners, listening to your customers and having a mentor. An animated Buffet serves as a character, offering insight while still letting the gang resolve their own problems.

The TV series will open with a bang. Enter Jay-Z, who guest-stars as a businessman who praises hard work at school and gives tips on how to be successful. Awesome. Hopefully he will talk about how to start your own record label, entertainment company, clothing line and become part owner of a basketball team, too.

As I was reading the article, I thought the concept behind the show was great; to my knowledge, there’s not a TV show like it. But when I went to the website and saw the stock ticker going across the page, I thought, “There’s no way at age eight I would have had anything to do with this.” I could imagine my dad encouraging me to watch it, and then it turning into some sort of punishment. Plus, if someone said “Jay-Z,” to me, I would have thought they were mixing up the alphabet.

Educational programs are an excellent opportunity for a company in any industry to educate kids, but does it really work? Are kids drawn to purely educational marketing? Tying a celebrity to the education program can definitely add interest, but how many 6-12 year olds can relate to Jay-Z? When using a celebrity to endorse your program, make sure the advocate is relevant to the audience and appropriate for the topic. I think Jay-Z is a great spokesperson for business-related topics, but would be better at reaching high school and college students and young adults.

I think educational programming is extremely important, but also very hard to pull off successfully. I watched classics like “Magic School Bus” and “Bill Nye the Science Guy”, but it’s hard to say how a serious, financial cartoon will go over. What will it take to get kids to tune in? Or is Buffet yet again making another million dollar, smart decision with this cartoon?

It wouldn’t be a MAX conference without the sneak peeks. This is one of the most anticipated events of the week, and as usual it didn’t disappoint. Whether these experimental tools make it into future versions of Adobe software is yet to be seen, but the crowd sure enjoyed them.

• Stacking Layers  - Ability to take multiple layers and rather than stack them on top of each other weave portions over or under other regions.
• Pixel Nuggets (Photo commonality searching) – Find photos of people, places, items, etc. that have common traits. Looking for a photo of someone facing the camera? Highlight the search subject and similar images will appear. Watch the demo – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOkw1IFrai0
• Image De-blurring – This was probably the highlight of the night, and something that has been in the works for a number of years. If you are like me and 50% of your photos turn out blurry, don’t delete them, fix them. By detecting the movement of the camera while the image was being shot, the program can adjust the affected pixels and clean up the image.
• Rub-a-dub – Perfectly sync re-dubbed audio over the original. (I can think of more than a few movies that could benefit from this technology)
• Crowd-sourced video sync – Several videos taken from multiple users, angles and timeframes all synced together based on similarities in the video. The output was like watching 10 TV’s all on the same channel with different video sources.
• Video meshes – Create 3D fly-through of 2D video. Move an object in the video closer or further away and automatically determind the size in respect to the new location and even hide items behind other items.
• Debugging reverse trace – Step backwards while debugging an application! Anyone that has ever stepped through a program trying to find a bug or even to just monitor variables at certain execution points will appreciate this feature.
• Near field communication – With the explosion of smart phones, the practical applications for this are endless. Tired of scanning barcodes or QR codes? With this technology just get your phone close to the object and let the device do the rest.
• GPU Parallelism – Offload intense operations to the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) for improved performance of the video/graphics display.

All of these demonstrations and more are available on Adobe TV.

It was an amazing few days getting to see what is in the works, learn new tricks, experiment with tools and products, catch up with acquaintances and revitalize the creative juices. With all of the sessions and labs available this conference could easily span the entire week and still leave attendees longing for more. I can’t wait for next year.

Read my full recap of the Adobe MAX conference here.

Adobe MAX is a yearly event put on by Adobe that allows designers, developers and business leaders to get together and learn about new and upcoming Adobe products, attend sessions & labs, learn industry best practices and network with their peers.

Day 1

One of the goals at Adobe is to simplify the lives of their users by giving them the tools they need to do their job more efficiently. In comes Adobe Creative Cloud, a collection of services available to desktops and tablets, to allow just that. By using the suite of Adobe Touch Apps, coming soon to Android and iOS tablets, creatives are no longer tethered to their desks during the creative process. Whenever and wherever inspiration strikes just open the appropriate app and draw, capture and save your ideas.

Adobe Touch Apps include:

• Collage – Create mood boards by capturing or importing assets, drawing, typing or changing colors schemes.
• Debut – Client presentation and review of Photoshop or Illustrator files.
• Ideas – Create vector based artwork, change color themes and import existing files.
• Kuler – Create and modify color schemes or browse existing user generated schemes for your projects.
• Photoshop Touch – Create and modify layered Photoshop files.
• Proto – This is quite possibly the coolest tool of all. Quickly create and modify wireframes that can then be exported to HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

All of these tools allow users to save their work “to the cloud” and then share or modify by specified users on other tablets or desktops. While all of these are individual tools, they work seamlessly together to streamline the creation process.

Typekit will be another addition to the Creative Cloud. Typekit provides designers and developers the ability to work with non-standard fonts in their sites providing fresher designs and less coding to achieve the desired user experience.

Day Two

Day two brought more surprises as Adobe announced that they where acquiring PhoneGap and integrating their services into the Creative Cloud as well. PhoneGap allows developers to build native applications that allow access to the device hardware features, such as the camera, accelerometer and your location, by using HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then deploy their sites to multiple platforms (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Symbian and Bada).

Last year, Adobe announced that they were dedicated to both Flash and HTML5, this year they proved it. With the release of Flash Player 11 and Air 3 they provided new features for flash developers including State 3D accelerated graphics rendering, native 64-bit support, native extensions for Adobe Air, captive runtime support (in other words bundling the Air runtime within your application instead of requiring the user to download it separately).

If you have already installed Flash Player 11 check out the Nissan Juke (http://www.nissan-stagejuk3d.com/) or Tanki Online (http://alternativaplatform.com/en/demos/crash/) Stage 3D experiences.

They also announced that they have a team that has been working with WebKit developers to develop and propose additions to the to the W3C specifications for CSS Regions and CSS Shaders.

• CSS Regions would allow developers to create pages that more closely resemble magazine layouts including flow, styling and arbitrary content shapes and exclusions. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cssregions/
• CSS Shaders would provide a very simple method for developers to add native effects to their web pages that would not have been possible in the past without using a 3rd party tool. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/html5/articles/css-shaders.html

Check back for the second part of my blog post when I share the sneak peeks Adobe shared at the conference.

Imagine sitting in a movie theater, impatiently waiting for previews to end and your featured film to start. A booming narrating voice catches your attention as a sensational, exciting action movie trailer begins. Flashing lights, dramatic colors and pulsing screen shots immediately catch your attention. But wait, is this…what…a bank commercial?

Click here to watch the commercial.

Kiwibank of New Zealand is aiming to push consumers to switch banks not through traditional marketing tactics, but in what seems like a launch for a new movie or video game. Green Ops: Operation Easyswitch closely resembles the video game Call of Duty or any spy/action flick, and has been all over the bank’s interactive YouTube channel. From a “first-person-shooter-point-of-view” style, visitors can see humorous clips encouraging them to switch banks, follow a team of Kiwibankers as they complete missions to save customers from bad banking experiences and link to a website to start the bank switching process.

The campaign is different and innovative, and it reaches the correct audience in an appropriate manner. There is a noticeable disconnect between young customers (16-25 year olds) and their banks. This demographic often sticks with the bank their parents use, and their parents might even still do a lot of their banking for them (deposits, savings, etc.) no questions asked. Starting a conversation with this age group welcomes the idea of choice and control. They don’t have to bank with their parents’ bank. By giving a thrilling twist to switching banks, the process seems more tangible and easier than what young consumers have been imagining.

This eye-catching, glamorous campaign easily grabs the attention of those hard to reach Millennials through a medium they know – video games and Hollywood. Humor and intrigue takes social media by storm, as younger age groups like to be in the “social media know” and be more apt to pass something great along through the grapevine. Banks successful at these practices will move toward being the “cool” bank to use by image-conscious Millennials.

While a Call of Duty–themed campaign may not be the right fit for all banks, it’s important to remember reaching certain audiences will require taking a leap of faith. Whether it’s trying a new medium, tweaking a message or coming up with a new, big idea, the right campaign will not only resonate with a certain demographic, but lead them to a desired action.

Or how I learned to stop worrying and love PersonHasOptedOutOfEmail

This post is brought to you not in the hope of inspiring some brilliant insight, nor to impress you with our marketing wizardry. This post is instead for the hapless google-searcher who, like myself, has been scouring the veritable wasteland of the Internet to find help with complications arising from using Person Accounts with the SalesForce API, such as the dreaded INVALID FIELD FOR INSERT UPDATE error when trying to set PersonHasOptedOutOfEmail. If that person is you, I hope the following is helpful.  If your eyes glazed over just now, feel free to click away or scroll past; I promise not to be offended.

First, a bit of background: In the beginning, there were Accounts and Contacts. An account generally represented a business, and contacts were all the minions employees of that business. So Bob’s Cogs, the world’s premier provider of only the finest Cogs, would be an Account, while the employees of Bob’s Cogs (Bill, Brandy, and the benevolent bookkeeper Bob) would each be a contact. Each Contact belonged to one Account, and an Account could have many Contacts. Simple enough.

But over time, as developers attempted to shove increasingly round pegs into the square holes that SalesForce offers, it became apparent that a new type of Account was necessary, one that just represented an individual without all the Account & Contact fuss. Thus the Person Account was born (and what was once called Account became known as Business Account).

A Person Account, in some ways, is really just a short-cut. It’s actually one Account and one Contact joined at the hip — a simple way to access both the Contact and Account information in one object, rather than having to manage two. It also forces you to have exactly one contact for the account — no more, no less. Of course, this can be a bit confusing — so much so, in fact, that SalesForce has Person Accounts disabled by default, and you have to specifically ask for them to be enabled.

So when you create a Person Account, you’re actually creating an Account with a magic, hidden Contact in the background.  All those Contact fields are then available through the Account, only prefixed with “Person” — so MailingStreet from Contact becomes PersonMailingStreet on Account, and so on.

The part that’s missing from the documentation is this: All the permissions that normally apply to a Contact, apply to the Person Account equivalent field. For example, when you attempt to set PersonHasOptedOutOfEmail on a person account, you’re basically setting the HasOptedOutOfEmail field on that person’s Contact record. This would be fine, except that the HasOptedOutOfEmail field is hidden to all users by default. If you’re getting an error on any particular Person field, you may need to edit it’s visibility and make it available and writable to whatever user is trying to create the record.

Another common source of INVALID FIELD FOR INSERT UPDATE errors is the Name field. On business accounts, you can set and read the Name field. That makes sense in that businesses have one name:  it’s “Bob’s Cogs,” not “Mr. Cogs, first name: Bob’s.” But people have many names, of which we’re most interested in the first and last. So Person Accounts provide fields for those two names, unsurprisingly called FirstName and LastName. Since “Name” no longer makes sense for a person, on Person Accounts it becomes read-only, and just returns the last name followed by the first name. Trying to set the Name field to a value on a Person Account will always cause an error, use the FirstName and LastName fields instead. Unless your name is Bono, in which case, just use the FirstName field.

Hopefully this clears some things up and saves some other developers a few hours of fruitless frustration. In the meantime, I’m off to slog through some more obscure SalesForce API nuances.

We would like to welcome Trevor Patch to the Lawrence & Schiller team. Trevor will be working as a Digital Specialist at L&S.

Originally from Pella, Iowa, Trevor graduated from Iowa State University in Ames with a degree in journalism and electronic media. In his free time, he enjoy reading, drawing and spending time with his girlfriend.

Trevor, welcome to the 5280 team!

I think back to my time in college when a group of my sorority sisters and I would sit in our living room and watch Grey’s Anatomy every week. Two years later and miles apart, we still get together to watch our favorite TV shows, thanks to technology.

Cell phones, texting and social media all play a role in creating the next generation of couch potatoes – the social couch potato. TV viewers have an even greater opportunity to interact with others during popular TV shows by blogging, tweeting and texting their thoughts and reactions to the television drama.

Social TV engagement is a reality. Take the record number of over 4,000 tweets per second during the final plays of Super Bowl XLV. The combination of technology and social media is an obvious benefit to viewers as it gives them the opportunity to update friends and comment on the game in real-time.

But it doesn’t end there, with new applications such as IntoNow and GetGlue gaining popularity, iPhone and tablet users are able to “check-in” to TV shows, movies and even commercials – similar to how foursquare allows users to “check-in” to various locations. These applications allow others to see what their friends are watching and when, as well as to be able to recommend shows and “invite” friends to watch them. 

Take a look at this video and see how the GetGlue iPhone app works.

Today, we don’t need our friends lounging next to us to enjoy watching TV with them. With new devices and mobile applications we can share what we are watching and our experience with them regardless of proximity. I’m predicting that as these applications gain in popularity, the social couch potato will thrive in the days ahead.

This is a more detailed explanation of the open source project announced in How L&S Programmers Are Giving Back. Learn more about L&S Open Source projects.

History

cf-password-generator, like a lot of open source projects, was born out of a need. Our need in this case was two-fold: to adopt strong passwords for the admin accounts of some of our web properties (primarily WordPress sites) and to make it easy for any developer on the team to get access to this password.

We considered, and rejected, the following strategies.

“What if we programmed something to generate the password for us?” Slowly the wheels started turning, the fingers started typing, and we had our cf-password-generator.

How It Works

cf-password-generator is basically two parts, the index CFM and the password component. The index CFM has a web form with two fields, Domain and Password, and a button, Generate. You paste the domain (or a full URL) into the Domain textbox and hit the button. What you’re given back is a hashed password, sufficiently strong and unguessable. When the index CFM posts, it creates a new instance of the password component by passing the value from the Domain textbox and a custom salt that you create yourself.

This salt is what keeps your passwords different and unguessable from someone else using cf-password-generator. It can be any sort of value, as long as it can be passed as a string. The default salt is “ENTER CUSTOM SALT.” If you try to use cf-password-generator with the default salt, it will throw an exception, which serves as a good reminder more-so than a security feature.

The password component is pretty straightforward. It has three functions, init, getHash, and getDomain, and two properties, password and domain. getHash and getDomain return the properties password and domain respectively. The init function does all the work. It takes in domain, salt, and an optional algorithm (default is MD5). First, it checks to see if the default salt is still being used or if an empty salt was passed in. If so, it throws an exception. If not, it does some normalization on the domain that is passed in, removing protocol and www if either exist and trimming off anything after the domain. (This helps keep passwords consistent by reducing the domain to a known minimum.) Then it creates the password concatenating the domain and the salt and by using the optional algorithm. The result is a 32 character string that is pretty tough to crack and cannot be reverse engineered.

How To Use It

After shopping around, we eventually decided to use Google Code for our project hosting. We could have hosted it internally, pushing static snapshots of the project to a webserver somewhere. We could have gone with with ColdFusion specific project hosting solutions, like http://riaforge.org/. Ultimately, Google Code’s project management tools best suited our needs.

Here are the basic steps for using cf-password-generator:

1. Proceed to the Source tab for our project page. Follow the directions for checking out the trunk of the project using Subversion.
   • svn checkout http://cf-password-generator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ cf-password-generator-read-only
2. Copy or move the directory to your ColdFusion webroot. At L&S we use Adobe ColdFusion 9 on our development and production servers. You can also use Railo or Open BlueDragon with Jetty or Apache Tomcat.
   • cf-password-generator works on Adobe ColdFusion 9, Railo 3.2, and Open BlueDragon 1.4.
3. Edit index.cfm to personalize the salt on line 5.
4. Finally, browse to the index.cfm file and generate some passwords.

Contribute

Do you want to help us out?

Check out the source and submit patches under the Issues tab.Or you can leave a comment on our Contribute page and, if you have a compelling enough reason, we’ll give you contributor or committer access to the project.

This is our first open source project, so we’re open to comments, critiques and questions!

NOTE: This week I fired up my time machine and went back to October 2010 to revisit my trip to Adobe MAX 2010. While preparing my presentation to the agency, I found this long lost blog post. The content is still relevant and has only been updated to reflect the passage of time.

What does the future of user experience look like? Touching, pinching and gesturing will play a big part in how users interact with your website or application.  The popularity of touch based devices is increasing at an exponential rate and in the next 2 years there will be more mobile devices in use than desktop PCs. Everything from iPods and iPads, to the numerous other tablet devices coming in the next few months will use touch as the primary interaction to the user experience.

In the first general session of Max 2010, Adobe laid out five areas of challenge for developers to overcome to build the best possible experience: websites, digital publications, video, enterprise applications and gaming.

Websites – How can developers build a site for multiple devices without actually building the site for multiple devices? With HTML5 and CSS3 media queries developers can determine the screen size and serve the appropriate CSS file for that screen. The CSS determines the layout and overall user experience for that device. Ok, slow down, HTML5? CSS3? How long have I been out? True, these technologies are not currently supported in over 85% of the desktop browsers on the internet, but they are coming. The good news is that most mobile and tablet browsers do support HTML5 and CSS3 already. To take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 on the desktop you must be running Chrome5 or 6, Safari, IE9 or Firefox 4.

Adobe is providing tools for developers to make developing multi-screen apps as simple as their single screen predecessors. The multi-screen option in Dreamweaver CS5 shows the developer in real-time what their site will look like on a variety of screen sizes. EDGE is a new application that will allow developers to use jQuery to develop user experiences that mimic Flash without writing code.

Digital Publications – If you pick any two magazines off the shelf and page through them you can quickly see that they are distinctly different in layout. Now, go to the website of those same two magazines and in most cases you will notice they look eerily similar. Wouldn’t it be nice to look at a magazine online and have a totally immersive experience that is just an extension of the magazine itself? Click on a recipe and see detailed step by step directions and videos of how to prepare the meal? Click on an ad and be presented with a rich media version of your advertising without ever leaving the page. http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalpublishing/2010/11/martha-stewart.html

Video – Over 120 Petabytes of flash video was viewed last month (September 2010), this is more than 125,000,000 Gigabytes of data, and that number is expected to continue to grow as more internet connected TVs begin to emerge. Google TV was launched in early October with integrated Flash player so users can “have access to the full web”. The example of viewing a video on your mobile device, hitting pause and then resuming on your TV was displayed.

Enterprise Applications – The new Blackberry Playbook was used to demo business applications such as SAP’s CIO Cockpit and SalesForce Chatter. LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2.5 was announced which includes improved multiscreen delivery, an updated framework for building rich internet applications and real-time collaboration.

Gaming – Over 70% of the games online are built in Flash, Adobe AIR allows Flash developers to deploy their games to mobile and tablet devices with little code manipulation and without writing code for each OS individually. Flash now also supports USB game controllers for an enhanced gaming experience.

In the second general session, Adobe delivered a fun-filled presentation set in the age of the digital living room to display their tools.  Several skits such as “Pimp My App”, “Iron Builder”, “Ben Forta Live”, “MAX Shopping channel” and “HTML5” were used to demonstrate just how easy it is to use their technology and get amazing results in a fraction of the time it would take with other tools. Watch all of the skits here: http://tv.adobe.com/show/max-2010-keynotes/

Sneak Peeks – This is the can’t miss event of the conference. An hour of Adobe employees demonstrating the cutting edge functionality they have been working on that may or may not make it into future releases of their products.

• Flash to HTML – Impressive demo that showed a .flv file being converted to HTML and running in the browser. The demo looked just like the flash file. Impressive!
• Flash Builder Live – Ever had problems coding when a co-worker is hovering over your shoulder? Try 5000 of them? Demo showing live changes to a Flash file from right within the editor.
• Video Tapestry – A new method of navigating through a video file using content aware snapshots.
• Flash Performance – Demo of tool that allows developers to analyze the CPU and memory their application is using.
• ColdFusion Device Info and Geolocation – The demo didn’t go so well, but if the changes make it into the finished product it is one more reason to use CF.
• Photoshop Whirlwind – If you have ever taken a fuzzy photo this demo is for you. Rather than delete the image why not just fix it? What about fixing brightness/exposure problems with a single click?
• Typography of code – Interesting idea about formatting source code. More than just the color-coding that we are all used to, but actually using different sizes and formatting to display rather than the monospaced style we are used to.
• Noise to meaning – Ever wanted to search for a guy’s voice in an audio stream and jump to it? What about playing music or the sound of a kiss? (their example, not mine). Even export as cuepoints in a file and trigger events in video player.
• Stage Video – Increase performance by moving the video out of the display list and putting it behind other content. Not sure how they are doing it, but the results speak for themselves.

Three days of sessions, talking with old friends, making new ones and playing with the newest technologies available takes a lot out of a person. The experience also forces you to take a step back and evaluate the way you approach your product development. Are you providing the best experience for your users? Can your website or application be used across multiple devices and platforms? Are you following best practices? Are you doing more work than you have to?

All attendees received a free Droid 2 and Logitech Revue (Google TV) to help get them started developing for these new screen sizes. Development for the Android operating system is surprisingly simple and the process to get an app on the Android market is even easier.

With the impending explosion of mobile development is your website ready?

In college I took a course in microeconomics. It was ECON101 that finally explained the maxim: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The lesson was that there is always a cost of some sort to reputedly free items, even if that cost isn’t financial (or if it isn’t yours). Let’s say your free lunch is a hamburger; a farmer has to raise the cattle, milk the cows, grow the wheat, the tomatoes, and the cucumbers which comprise that burger. There’s a cost of time and resources and the farmer deserves to be compensated. There’s also cost in processing those materials, moving them to your geographic location, assembling and cooking them, advertising them, et cetera. “Not so free now, is it?”, quips the smug economics professor.

Yet, what if the cost of making a hamburger was limited to writing the recipe? What if the cost of any meal was the time and knowledge it took to write the recipes and the cards upon which to write them? How would the world be different then? We would keep recipe books of our must-haves; we’d go out to restaurants to read their fancy, expensive recipes; and some people would hand out recipes for free, just to improve everyone’s lunch a little. Well, replace “recipe” with “software”, and you have a pretty good idea of what Open Source Software is all about.

While there are many official definitions for “open source software”, the general definition is any software that shares its source code. Source code is like the recipe for a piece of software. Sure, there’s still some cooking to do, but if you have the recipe, and you’re comfortable enough in the kitchen, you can make the meal. Source code works the same way.

The web has been a poster child for the benefits of open source software. Some of the most popular technologies, tools, and languages of the web are open source projects. You, personally, have been touched in some way by open source software; this website is powered by it!

There are many benefits to open source software. One of the most obvious benefits is to cash-strapped developers and webmasters; open source software is usually available at no cost. In fact, using open source software is often as simple as downloading the source code, dropping it onto a server, and firing up a web browser. Open source software also provides an environment of competition. The first way it does this is by keeping similar products innovative, in the same way a free market keeps similar businesses competitive.¹ The second way is in the fostering of new technologies.²

Certainly, there are huge benefits to using open source software, but are there any benefits to creating open source software? L&S programmers think so. Here is the logic:

• L&S usually programs websites using Adobe ColdFusion
• The open source community for ColdFusion is small but growing
• More open source ColdFusion software means a larger community
• A larger community means more opportunities for outsourcing, partnerships, and recruiting for L&S

Worst case scenario, we add to the open source ColdFusion community with new software. Best case scenario, we discover new opportunities for outsourcing, partnerships, and recruiting. Really, it’s a win-win(-win) scenario, so why not do it?

That is why the L&S programmers are pleased to announce L&S’s first open source project: cf-password-generator! (Pause for fanfare and applause.) cf-password-generator lets users easily generate complicated, secure passwords for websites. You give it a URL; it gives you a password. It is a tool we developed internally to solve three common password questions:

1. What is the administrator password for this website?
2. What password should I use for this new website?
3. How do we get in the habit of using better passwords?

cf-password-generator was the answer to all these questions, and we wanted to share that answer with the community.

Rest assured, there is nothing in the source code for cf-password-generator that will give hackers the ability to access L&S websites. Security and intellectual property are always concerns when a corporation decides to make a software product open source, and we’ve had to address those same concerns. While I’ll leave the specifics of how we’ve addressed those concerns to another blog post, it’s safe to say that this source code in no way comprises the security of L&S’s products.

Since this is L&S’s first step into the waters of open source software, we’re eager to get feedback. Are you a ColdFusion developer? Take cf-password-generator for a spin, and let us know how we can improve it (with your help). Do you participate in open source software? Leave a comment with any tips, tricks, or techniques. Are you a client or potential client who’s interested in learning more about open source software? Contact us; we’d love to talk with you.

1. A great example of this is Firefox. Mozilla’s Firefox web browser is an open source project whose goal was to create competition for the stagnant Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser. Firefox did so well, in fact, that Microsoft was forced to improve its product after a five year lull, giving us IE7 in 2006, IE8 in 2009, and the up-coming IE9.
2. Consider, if you will, the case of PHP. When PHP was first introduced in 1995, the world of web programming was woolly and wild. PHP came along as a simplified scripting language, allowing developers to more easily create dynamic websites. Better yet, it was open source. It didn’t take long for a community to build up around the product, which in turn led to numerous open source projects.

The face of mobile computing changed dramatically this past year. Apple’s iPad, Google’s Android phones, and the continuing rise of netbooks has put a sharp spotlight on what we call “mobile”. This flood of impressive devices has caused a surge in mobile web usage. Suddenly, people can enjoy much of the same Internet their desktop computer provides but in a convenient, portable device. This has been a game changer for all websites.

Three Midwest companies saw amazing growth in the number of people visiting their website from a mobile device. When comparing the months of November 2009 and November 2010, the number of mobile visits grew 441%, 450%, and 699%. Note that there are no decimal points in those figures. Mobile visits quadrupled for two of the companies and septupled¹ for the third. It’s important to note that these weren’t visits to a walled-garden, stripped-down, mobile-friendly version of their websites; these visitors were seeing the exact same site as they would on a desktop computer. This substantial growth points to the simple truth: consumers are engaged in online activities via their mobile device, whether those websites are ready or not.

While it’s true that mobile web browsers have seen remarkable growth and refinement of late, they are still no replacement for the browsers on our desktop machines. Mobile visitors have different needs than desktop users, and, if your website doesn’t keep this in mind, mobile users may have a frustrating experience when they arrive at your homepage. The growth of mobile visits makes a strong case; if your business doesn’t have a mobile compatible site, you are essentially ignoring those costumers’ needs.

Is it worth your time and money to invest in creating mobile compatible websites? The short answer is yes. Your website is your company’s first impression for many customers, so make it a good one! If you’re interested in seeing how your company can be more mobile compatible, we’d love to talk to you. Drop us a line, or learn more about the mobile web on Wikipedia or Google webmaster central.

1. Extensive Google searching indicates that “septupled” might not actually be a word.

We hear a lot of talk about social networks, especially about their rising popularity and impressive growth around the world. As we near the end of 2010, let’s take a step back and have a quick peek at some important statistics from the past year.

-3 of the world’s most popular brands are social networks –Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia.

-The world now spends [110 billion minutes] on social networking sites.

-The number of people visiting these sites has increased by 24% over the last year.

-The time the average visitor now spends on social network sites has increased 66% from last year.

-When Facebook first debuted it targeted US college students. Now the creator, Mark Zuckerberg, has been named Time’s “Person of The Year” because of his ability to connect almost 600 million people through the use of one website.

-Today, Americans are still the highest users of social networks, according to a study by Pew Global Attitudes Project. Of Americans polled, 46% said that they use social networks.

-In the US, 77% of social network users are between the ages of 18-29 while only 23% are 50 years or older.

Social networks are constantly changing and as we near the end of the year it will be exciting to see what changes are in store for the world of social networks in 2011.

I’ve never been much of an NBA fan. Sure, I’ll occasionally look over the standings during the regular season, see a game or two during the playoffs and tune in to the finals if one of the teams is from Boston or LA.

But now, suddenly, I want to watch. All the time. I want to watch the Heat, the Magic, even the Timberwolves. I want to watch because I have seen the future of sports television… and it isn’t on TV. It’s on my laptop.

Thanks to a link on Sports Illustrated, I stumbled upon “TNT Overtime” and the Miami-Cleveland game. Which probably leads you to say, “So what? Watch it on TV like everyone else.”

True, that is the option most fans would exercise but “TNT Overtime” gives me the regular TV announcers’ play-by-play PLUS:

• My choice of four camera angles OR picture-in-picture OR a mosaic of all four shots
• Real time game stats
• Very limited commercial breaks

It’s a sports fan’s dream! A full buffet of video and information streaming at me free of charge!

Now, I do need to make a confession… I reside in a non-cable household. I know. Makes me a statistical freak and probably will drive my kids to watch 24/7 when they go to college. But I live in the country, with no cable service and for a variety of reasons I’ve chosen not to buy Dish or DirecTV. So I only catch what’s available on broadcast TV.

However the list of programs I’m missing is shrinking all the time. Hulu and NetFlix has been serving up the entertainment I want for quite a while. And now thanks to a growing list of websites, I’m getting access to more and more sporting events too.

• TNT provides online viewing of the NBA on Thursday night plus golf and NASCAR coverage.
• NBC offers Sunday Night Football online with your choice of camera angles, live stats and “all access” interviews.
• ESPN3 serves up a wide variety of college football and basketball, golf, rodeo and even cricket – if your Internet Service Provider has reached a deal with ESPN.

What does this all mean?

It means content providers better spool up their broadcasts to include more information and options for online viewers.
It means smart advertisers will grab prime sponsorships before ad rates go up and before their competitors catch on.
And it means I don’t want to see any more games where my only viewing options are “on” and “off”.

Midcontinent Communications has recently launched their new Facebook page, and they want you to join in! Get the latest on Special Offers, FREE preview weekends, local sports action, career opportunities, access to support staff and links to the latest in On Demand! It’s definitely worth a look around!

So go “Like” Midcontinent and meet a few of the “Good People” who make Midcontinent the Midwest’s leading provider for all your communication needs. You can also keep up with Midcontinent in your community and see how they are involved and helping out through sponsorships and volunteering.

Check out Midcontinent’s Facebook and see why it is “Rated Number One for Overall Entertainment Satisfaction.”

Don’t look now, but mobile devices are taking over. Assuming the trend continues at the current pace, mobile devices will outnumber desktop computers sometime in early 2013. Is your website ready for the mobile revolution?

What is fueling the mobile movement?

• Increased competition has driven down prices making smartphones more affordable.
• Hardware is continually improving. (Moore’s Law)
• Average battery life has improved
• Increasing bandwidth capability. 3G/4G networks bring Rich Internet Applications (RIA) to mobile devices

What does this mean for your website? Should you build a mobile app or retro-fit your existing content into a mobile website? Each has their place as well as their advantages and disadvantages. Ideally, your site should be built in a manner that allows existing content to be reused on your mobile site with little to no re-development.

Mobile applications are platform specific and need to be downloaded and installed onto the end users smartphone or tablet. There are several different development platforms: Symbian OS, RIM’s BlackBerry OS, Android, Apple’s IOS and Windows Mobile to name a few and your app needs to be programmed from the ground up for each of them.

Mobile websites are simply websites formatted to fit within the device’s viewing area that can be viewed on any web browser mobile or desktop. There are some disadvantages to mobile websites. They do not have access to any of the smartphone’s built in functionality like the accelerometer, camera, video or microphone.

Fortunately, now there is a third option. Adobe AIR, a cross browser, cross platform, runtime has been developed to allow developers to build applications once and have them run on multiple devices. AIR applications have all of the benefits of a mobile application with few of the headaches that go along with mobile development. It also allows the developer local databases storage using SQLite so data can be stored on the device rather than on the server.

No matter which method you decide to use for your mobile content here are a few other things to consider while developing.

1. Screen size and orientation – There are almost as many different screen sizes as there are devices, make sure your design scales appropriately and can accommodate both portrait and landscape modes.
2. Bandwidth usage – Not everyone has a data plan, your site should be lean and load quickly.
3. Battery life – Is your application too battery intensive?
4. Connectivity – Can the user access your application when they don’t have a live connection? Should they be able to?
5. Memory usage – Make sure you are profiling your application during development. This not only allows you to spot and fix problem areas, but also helps to determine which devices you can support based on system requirements.

While I mostly discussed mobile phone development, the same principles apply to development for tablets and interactive televisions. Devices such as the iPad, BlackBerry PlayBook (available Q1 2011), Archos 7 tablet, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Google TV and Samsung Internet@TV are just a few of the products that allow customers to interact with your website in non-traditional ways. In order to give your users the best experience possible it is time to start thinking outside the browser.

Look for more posts in the coming months on the specifics of mobile development.

Shopping for the latest shoes and accessories, among other things, seems to be at the top of most women’s online shopping list. But what about shopping around for their health information?

Surprisingly, a study by Burst Media says that 90.1 percent of women between the ages of 25-34 years of age search online for health information, in comparison to 66.9 percent of men of the same age group.  Women are also more likely to go online for their health questions and concerns rather than to their friends and family.

These women are driving web usage, especially in the area of medical sites, and they are transforming the type of sites people will visit for health questions and concerns. User-generated content (UGC) sites, similar to a blog, forum, or chat room, are a growing trend. However, keep in mind that many of these women are not professionals and that their opinions or experiences will not be true for everyone.

For curious and health conscious women – and men – who want to know more, check out the WebMD and Mayo Clinic websites.

I rely on technology everyday for work. If you look at the arsenal of hardware on my desk at home, you will see four computers (both Mac and PC), a smartphone, an IP phone, an iPod, a webcam, a wireless router as well as my most recent toy, the iPad. All of these gadgets keep me connected and let me do my job, and I’ve totally convinced my husband that they are a necessity. (ahem)

About three years ago, I realized that my children will grow up in a very different world then I did, both for work and play. This is the age of information, where amazing amounts of knowledge are at your fingertips. Today, words like “apps”, “tweeting” and “friending” are commonly used and part of my daily vocabulary. And when I need to learn something new, I go directly to the internet.

As I type this, I have a three-year-old clone sitting next to me learning her shapes, tracing, matching and coloring, not on paper mind you, but rather on my iPad. She is absorbing and learning at an alarming rate and our iPad, in my opinion, is helping. This is the same girl that mastered the Nintendo DS stylus at age 2 and would beg her older cousin to play with the iPod Touch on a long family trip to Canada, so a touch screen is nothing new. It is only natural that she would steal the iPad from me.

When we bought the iPad, it was supposed to be MY toy. I’m in that “mom demographic” Apple was gunning for! I had visions of using the iPad to surf, check Facebook, read books and watch movies. But that’s not quite what it’s being used for now that my daughter has got a hold of it.

Since I didn’t want her surfing around my Tweetdeck app and replying to my followers with nonsense, I found myself searching for “age appropriate” apps that SHE could enjoy. First, I searched for “Toy Story”, since she is in love with that movie, and low and behold, I find a free Read-A-Long book to download. Boom, installed! She loves to draw, so I find a Doodle app. Boom, installed again! After that, it all went downhill. Now before bed, I find myself searching apps for HER to play with and less for ME! (I also suggest keeping a password prompt on your iTunes account so your child isn’t “auto” buying apps! I might elaborate on that story in another blog post…)

8 Apps My Three-Year-Old Loves:

1. Tangrams

I myself liked tangrams as a kid with the “real” blocks, making shapes and simple pictures. It took her one trip in the car to master this app. Dragging and dropping blocks onto shadowed outlines allowed her to make fun designs with the apps’ easy user interface.

2. Fruit Memory

This recent purchase is a well-designed matching game. If I had a dollar for every time she asks “Mom? Where’s the lemon?? I can’t find it!!” I’d have… well maybe only 40 bucks, but still. This is the game that we can play together since it supports up to four players.

3. Doodle Buddy 

Since I myself am an artist, I found it necessary to have an app where she could draw. I use Sketchbook Pro but I needed something a little less robust for her. And although my daughter likes the drawing part with all the colors, she like the stamps that make funny sounds better. (Especially the smiley face that makes the “sick” sound. Thanks for that.)

4. Disney Movies

Disney Movies lets you preview movie trailers and then takes you to the iTunes store to purchase. (clever and sneaky) But the reason that I put this in my post was because Disney Movies was the app where my daughter REALLY learned the “pinch and grow” sizing technique and the “moving and sliding” of information. It blew me away how quickly she picked this up.

5. Alphabet Tracing

Again, learning disguised as fun. She doesn’t get very far into the letters but understands that she needs to follow the dotted lines. This is my attempt at being a “responsible” mom and telling myself: She WILL learn something playing with this thing!

6. Virtuoso – Piano 

I actually first saw this app being used by the 3-month-old son of Miles, an interactive programmer at L&S. My daughter plays it much like she plays a regular piano, sliding her hands across the keys or poking them one by one. She isn’t a Mozart yet but enjoys the sounds and I find myself looking for more instrument type apps.

7. Toy Story Read-Along

This was one of the first apps I downloaded and installed because of her love of the movie (and my love as well). Basically it’s an e-book with puzzles and coloring pages in between story pages that can be read out loud as the words are highlighted. I’m hoping this one will help her with words and reading. It even has quick video clips that play as you are reading.

8. Default iPod App 

(preinstalled with the iPad/iTunes)

Listening to music is a given and she has her own playlist with “girl” songs. Usually I will find her jamming out to some hippity hop song in the living room with the iPad cranked up to 11. Yesterday I walked in to check on her as she is getting her groove on and she turns around, points at the door and says, “Mom, you go back to work, I’m dancing.” Le sigh.

Don’t worry, she still likes drawing with REAL crayons, running around outside, NOT cleaning her room and playing with toys. But on a side note, I’ve had to limit her time on the iPad since she is so addicted and we’ve even had to take it away during timeout.

Rather than “No TV young lady!”, it’s “No iPad young lady!!!”

If you have any favorite iPad/iPod apps you’d like to share, post them in our comments. 

April Johnston is the Senior Interactive Art Director at Lawrence and Schiller and an awesome mom according to her daughter. And yes, there is an insurance plan on her iPad.

Consumers are constantly connected – being plugged in online and tuned into the television, myself included. It is not enough to just watch television or only surf the web, as most viewers are now consuming both simultaneously.

A new study by Nielsen uncovers that three out of four Americans use TV and the web at the same, with about half of those doing so daily. So, if you are not one of the dual users, you are surprisingly in the minority.

Interestingly, women tend to multitask more often than men, with 77 percent utilizing both TV and web versus men at 73 percent. On average, about 2.5 hours a week are spent consuming the two mediums together.

Many television shows and commercials encourage viewers to go online and access additional content, whether it’s extra footage, background information, games, etc., but only about 7 percent are using the web for that purpose. Most Americans using both are checking email or Facebook, rather than content related to their television viewing.

Primetime shows are not the ones taking the biggest hit, as viewers tend to stick to just television during original programming. News and sports shows are the common television programming being viewed while using the Internet as well.

And these stats are probably even greater if you were to take smartphone usage into account. My usual television watching routine is often riddled with web-surfing and BlackBerry checking. Mobile marketing is also being thrown into the mix and gaining momentum, making marketing channels farther reaching and more accessible.

For marketers, this may be viewed as an added opportunity. The concurrent consumption is a true testament to the fact that marketers should not rely on or limit themselves to just one medium.

The opportunities to get messaging to consumers are only going to continue to evolve and grow. Staying on the cusp of those opportunities is what will set marketers apart from the rest in this ever-changing world.